A movie of rare integrity: "Bloody Sunday" (2002)

Last night I watched Bloody Sunday+.

“It’s unquestionably the most difficult, the most contentious, the most controversial single day of the whole Troubles,” says Bloody Sunday writer-director Paul Greengrass of January 30, 1972. “In a sense, it’s the day that propelled Northern Ireland into 30 years of conflict.” On that brisk winter’s afternoon in Derry, what began as a civil rights march plummeted into rioting and then lethal chaos when British paratroopers shot 27 unarmed Catholics, killing 14. Based on Don Mullan’s oral history, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, Greengrass’s harrowing panorama of the massacre (screening at the New York Film Festival on October 2 and 3 before opening in theaters October 4) serves as a vital corrective to decades of blame-the-victim obfuscation by the British government.

“I think people in Britain always wanted them to be terrorists,” says Greengrass, himself an Englishman, of Derry’s fallen. “Their families went through so much hardship—not only did they lose their sons and fathers, but then their reputations were smeared with the tar of terrorism. But I also wanted to convey that Bloody Sunday was never meant to happen. The British thought they were going to go in there and get tough with hooligans, and that desire shaded into excessive force and beyond that into, essentially, murder.”

Bloody Sunday achieves a chilling verisimilitude further enhanced by the participation of actual witnesses. On the initial day of re-creating the march, Greengrass recalls, “a lot of former British soldiers were on one end of the street and all these citizens of Derry were at the other. These are people who were sworn enemies for decades. I remember thinking, Oh my god, I’ve made the worst mistake of my life; this is all about to go horribly wrong. And then—I’ll never forget it—Don Mullan, who had been there on that day as a young boy, walked through the crowd to the soldiers and shook hands with them. That broke the ice.”

It comes as no surprise that Greengrass cut his teeth on docs, as a producer for Granada’s World in Action series. (He made his first theatrical feature, the Kenneth Branagh-Helena Bonham Carter weepie The Theory of Flight, in 1998.) Greengrass first visited Derry in 1980 while researching a piece on Irish Republican Army soldier and hometown boy Raymond McCartney, then serving two life sentences for murder and at the bitter end of a 53-day hunger strike that he barely survived. “His cousin, Jim Wray, was killed on Bloody Sunday—shot twice in the back,” says Greengrass. (Gilles Peress’s extraordinary photograph captures 22-year-old Wray sitting in calm protest minutes before his death, as demonstrators rampage behind him.) “Ray was about the same age as me, ostensibly living in the same country, listening to the same pop music, watching the same football, and it seemed unimaginable that this is the same bloke who decides, ‘All right, let’s shoot people in the head from three foot’ and then decides to starve himself to death. And I guess I wanted to know why.” To that end, Greengrass began a secret correspondence with McCartney. “The first sentence of his first letter is, ‘It all began for me on Bloody Sunday.’ ”

So much came to an end on Bloody Sunday—the lives of 14 men and the very possibility that Northern Ireland’s course of rebellion could be steered not by the resurgent, vengeance-fueled IRA but a nonviolent, integrated civil rights movement, as espoused by Derry’s then-MP, Ivan Cooper. A founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party—mainstay of the Catholic middle class—Cooper, a Protestant, helped conceive the day’s march as a peaceful demonstration against the ongoing internment of suspected IRA militants, often on the flimsiest of pretenses.

“When I saw Paul’s film for the first time, I was right back on the streets where I’d been that day—I felt that horror and that fear,” says Cooper, now 58 and a small-business consultant. “For us in Derry, we have the feeling that we’ve been vindicated. For people in the wider world, you have the feeling of an injustice that was covered up by the highest law officer in the land and by the entire government machine.” Tony Blair’s Labour leadership has also done its part to amend for past wrongs—including, perhaps, the awarding of an OBE to the British paramilitaries’ commanding officer for his services during Bloody Sunday—by opening an unprecedented second inquiry into the event. (The tribunal is expected to report its findings in about two years’ time; the first former IRA member to testify, on September 5, was Raymond McCartney.)

Cooper did harbor some skepticism when Greengrass approached him about the project (”You must remember he is English,” Cooper points out), but he was won over in part by the casting of James Nesbitt, star of the hugely popular TV comedy Cold Feet—”the Friends of the U.K.,” as Greengrass puts it. “Jimmy too is from a middle-class Protestant background and grew up not far from Derry,” Cooper says. “I thought he could bring some of the feeling of isolation which I have felt on occasion—though I don’t feel it any longer.”

Indeed, both Greengrass and Cooper believe that stubborn sectarian prejudices in Northern Ireland are beginning to dissipate, though Bloody Sunday arrives on these shores following a summer of ceaseless—and occasionally fatal—violence in areas of Belfast. “It’s horrendous and depressing, but the situation is immeasurably better than it was five years ago,” Greengrass says. “We’re not at war—it’s not like it was 15 or 30 years ago—and it’s not peace. It’s this indeterminate area where progress is being made all the time, but there is a continual two steps forward, one step back.” …

That review from Village Voice says it all. There was no music — except for U2’s anthem “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” at the end, most of it to a black screen, and all camera-work was hand-held. There was no compromising the Northern Irish accents. Looking at the people as an Australian, I recognised them as my people. They just look like most of us. My own family came (some voluntarily, some not) from that part of the world around 180 years ago, but their prejudices stayed with them much longer, not really petering out until the 20th century. That day was not Britain’s finest hour; in fact, if on a smaller scale, it reminds one of Tiananmen Square. See the 1998 Enquiry. I am afraid, while noting it, the events of that day made less impact here in Australia, except no doubt among the Irish community, as we were preoccupied with Vietnam and local politics, at a very exciting stage back then.

I suspect too the film-makers in 2002 had in mind what was happening post-September 11. The downside of draconian anti-terror laws and of reliance on the military mind, the ironic effect in further radicalising the young and exacerbating the bloodshed and pain — I think all those lessons are there if you would see them, just as Palestine today is partly the result of failure on both sides to heed the voice of non-violence and give it space.

At least Northern Ireland seems at last to have found some resolution, but no thanks to the authorities who brought on the events so authentically recreated in this very fine movie.

I can’t believe the news today
I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long, how long?
‘Cos tonight
We can be as one, tonight.
Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street.
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Oh, let’s go.
And the battle’s just begun
There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trenches dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters
Torn apart.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long, how long?
‘Cos tonight
We can be as one, tonight.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Wipe the tears from your eyes
Wipe your tears away.
I’ll wipe your tears away.
I’ll wipe your tears away.
I’ll wipe your bloodshot eyes.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
Sunday, bloody Sunday.
And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality.
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die.
The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On…
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday..

There are two must-see supplementaries on the DVD: an interview of Ivan Cooper MP by James Nesbitt, who plays him in the movie, and an account of how and why the film was made as an act of reconciliation. I think it is nonsense to say, as apparently some British Conservatives said when the movie was first screened on UK TV in 2002, that Bloody Sunday is “outrageously anti-British”. I found it outrageously honest; if any viewpoint is at the centre of the film it is that of Ivan Cooper, of Martin Luther King, of Gandhi. The way of terror is not endorsed, nor is the way of reckless militarism, nor is the way of “if you are not for us you are against us.”

The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On…
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday..

Good enough to sing in church at Easter. I may mention it…